As an Occupy Wall Street activist goes to trial on charges of assaulting a police officer, author and lawyer Chase Madar asks what the rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of the press and freedom from warrantless search are worth in the United States today.

Seattle’s first socialist city official in decades, an economics teacher, former Occupy Wall Street activist and former Truthdigger of the Week, ran on a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. She enters office Monday along with Mayor Ed Murray.

Dan Cantor, executive director of the Working Families Party, the national, independent, inequality-focused political coalition sponsored by labor unions that helped elect Bill de Blasio to the position of mayor of New York City, tells “Democracy Now!” about the role Occupy Wall Street played in the latest election.

The UC Davis cop who pepper-sprayed at close range a group of peacefully protesting students was awarded $38,000 for his experience in the aftermath of the altercation, more than those he brutalized received.

On the second anniversary of that day in lower Manhattan when people sat down in outrage and stayed in dedication and solidarity and hope, remember how unpredictably the world changes, remember those doing heroic work that you might hear little or nothing about but who are all around you, remember to hope and remember to build.

“Did the FBI ignore, or even abet, a plot to assassinate Occupy Houston leaders?” asks journalist Dave Lindorff at WhoWhatWhy. “What did the Feds know? Whom did they warn? And what did the Houston Police know?”

American high-tech surveillance is not the only kind around. There’s also the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers and sometimes government-instigated violence, which major news organizations have not put together in a way that gives us an overview of the phenomenon.

Debt has been weaponized “pretty much continually” for the last four or five millennia by “people who have access to the ability to make credit,” the anthropologist, Occupy activist and anarchist said on the “Keiser Report” TV show in late April.

If you take the long view, you’ll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of courage, love and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world suddenly.

The Other 98%, a group loosely associated with Occupy Wall Street, is trying to raise enough cash to outbid Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers in their efforts to buy the Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun, among other newspapers.

In line with the teachings of academic and social philosopher Noam Chomsky, a study shows that people are likelier to join causes that present visions of a society that is warmer, friendlier and more moral than the one they live in than they are to support efforts that do not feature such outlooks.

Guided by the notion that unregulated, market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, a business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility and conscience in the United States, writes Henry A. Giroux in his new book, “Youth in Revolt.”

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the woman who obtained records showing the FBI monitored Occupy Wall Street from its earliest days as a potential terrorist threat, talks about how agents conducted the effort to track the movement.

Postmodern confusion about how populist movements take hold and flourish caused Occupy Wall Street to “deconstruct” itself in a frenzied obsession with nonhierarchical structures, a disdain for demands, and other trappings of “lazy, reflexive libertarianism,” author and columnist Thomas Frank writes in The Baffler.

An offshoot of Occupy Wall Street called Strike Debt has launched a movement called Rolling Jubilee that seeks to eliminate debt by purchasing it from financial firms and canceling it so borrowers do not have to repay.

Members of New York City’s Occupy movement are waging an expanding relief effort for tens of thousands of people who remain without heat, power or hot water in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Observers are calling it Occupy’s finest hour.

The University of California on Wednesday reached an expensive settlement with the 21 UC Davis students and alumni who were pepper-sprayed by campus police during what was otherwise a peaceful demonstration last year in support of the Occupy movement.

Observers say Occupy is dead, but the multimillion-dollar conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity is organizing a demonstration against the movement in New York City on Thursday “to stand up to Occupy Wall Street extremists.”

The one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street produced a lot of mainstream media stories that assured you Occupy was only a bunch of tents that came down last year. Don’t buy it. A year is nothing and the mainstream media is oblivious to where power lies and how change works.

In his article “The Cancer in Occupy” posted on Truthdig in February, Chris Hedges criticized Black Bloc activists, saying their use of violence in the streets would alienate the Occupy movement from mainstream Americans and legitimize the use of police violence in the eyes of the public. Black Bloc supporter Brian Traven debated him in New York City last week.

Twitter has bowed to threats of substantial fines and released messages sent by Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris relating to the arrest of roughly 700 people at a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011.

The first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street promises to be a day of celebration, general protest and direct action one year after the cry for representation for the 99 percent first rang out in the streets of New York City’s financial district.

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges stopped by “Democracy Now!” to talk about the Chicago public school teachers’ strike, “arguably one of the most important labor actions in probably decades,” which “illustrates the bankruptcy of both traditional labor and the Democratic Party.”

New York City officials are blaming Brookfield Properties, the owner of the park where Occupy Wall Street activists were camped for nearly two months, for thousands of dollars of damage done to books, computers and other property destroyed during the eviction of protesters.

Think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Tax Foundation like to cherry-pick tax data to claim that the rich pay more than their fair share. But a broad look at taxation shows it’s not true, a writer at The Economist says.

“If this political system throws itself against three girls ... it shows this political system is afraid of truth,” a member of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot said as a judge set a verdict date on charges that the musicians engaged in hooliganism against the Russian government.

In the early hours of July 10, armed SWAT officers burst through the doors of an apartment belonging to organizers of Occupy Seattle as part of an ongoing investigation into the May Day riots. Phillip Neel, one of the residents of that apartment, talks about the ordeal.

Devices that intercept calls and text messages and dig into data stored on your mobile phone are being marketed to police departments across the United States “as being perfect for covert operations in public order situations.” Or, as the ACLU’s Privacy SOS blog puts it: protests.

Last week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: an indie look at the downfall of Washington Mutual, political surrogacy on the campaign trail, filmmaker Amy Ziering on rape in the military, and youth voter outreach at the world’s largest dance party.

Last week on Truthdig Radio in association with KPFK: an indie look at the downfall of Washington Mutual, political surrogacy on the campaign trail, filmmaker Amy Ziering on rape in the military, and youth voter outreach at the world’s largest dance party.

“If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes,” Picasso said, naming the distinct advantage that artists have always had over pundits and polemicists when it came to perceiving the world as it is; pundits and polemicists being much more likely to insist that the world is whatever a person wants it to be.

Two recently foiled “terrorist plots” that the U.S. government and mainstream media connected to the Occupy movement turned out to have been facilitated by federal agents. But that fact has “not stopped many from branding Occupy with an unfavorable stain,” RT reports.

In the seventh episode of “The World Tomorrow,” Julian Assange and key Occupy figures from both sides of the Atlantic met in a hollowed-out Deutsche Bank building to talk about the movement’s inception and the challenges it has faced so far.

Reflecting on his arrest with Kurt Vonnegut while protesting apartheid outside the South African consulate in the early 1980s, David Lindorff, founder of the news blog This Can’t Be Happening, says he and the author might be treated differently if they were arrested today.

Police stopped and drew guns on a group of independent journalists who were driving home after covering the NATO protests in Chicago on Monday evening. Tim Pool and Luke Rudkowski, two of the best-known live streamers covering the Occupy movement, believe they may have been targeted.

Protesters coaxed by federal agents into plotting terrorist attacks are imprisoned without bond while known terrorists are allowed to walk free the day of their arrest. The difference? Political ideology: The entrapped “criminals” are associates of the Occupy movement, while the actual terrorists are merely well-established violent white supremacists.